Author

Abstract

Our built environment and communities are facing an increasing rate and magnitude of natural disaster. Accordingly, the different stakeholders are concerned about their investments' vulnerability. This requires a new generation of decision support tools that integrate the host community's vulnerability assessment while taking into account the stakeholders' interactions, needs, and preferences. This paper develops a prototype agent based model that utilizes an environmental vulnerability indicator to better guide the decision making process of the interrelated stakeholders. The four step researched methodology incorporates: (1) implementing an environmental vulnerability assessment tool; (2) developing the different stakeholders' objective functions, potential strategies, and learning behaviors; (3) creating an interdependent agent based model that simulates the associated stakeholders and the vulnerability indicator; and (4) interpreting and analyzing the results generated from the developed model. The proposed prototype model was developed and tested on the post-Katrina development in three coastal Mississippi counties. The model optimized the different stakeholders' decision actions that increased their individual utility functions and decreased the host community vulnerability. This research approach should collectively maximizes the host community welfare and decreasing its environmental vulnerability, thus, achieving a sustainable disaster recovery.